Heavenly music that saved Alice from Hell

The healing power of music has never been better illustrated than in this compelling life of Alice Herz-Sommer.

This gifted pianist, born in 1903 in Prague, became at 16 the youngest member of the master class at Prague's prestigious German musical academy.

As a German-speaking Jew, moving in a cultured circle of musicians and intellectuals (Franz Kafka was a family friend), she survived the deprivations of World War I, offering piano tuition and helping in soup kitchens set up to feed the mass influx of starving Eastern European Jewish refugees.

By the age of 21, she was hailed as one of Prague's top concert pianists. Life was wonderful.

Critics raved about her performances.

She won prizes galore.

Then, at the height of her popularity, married with a small son, her world of privilege and comfort began to crumble. Hitler's anti-Semitism had slithered its slimy way across Europe.

With the Nazi occupation of Prague in 1939, the rights of its Jewish citizens were viciously eroded. They were dismissed from their employment and banned from swimming pools, parks, theatres, concert halls and public transport.

They were ordered to hand over jewellery, cash and possessions.

They were forbidden to make music, own telephones, employ non-Jewish home helps or buy sugar, tobacco and textiles.

Alice's Czech neighbour offered to buy her these forbidden items, but charged her double.

Their movement about the city was restricted and — worst humiliation — the wearing of the Star of David became compulsory.

Failure to comply would mean execution.

Of 120,000 citizens defined as Jews, 26,000, including most of Alice's family, fled abroad. Then that escape route was closed.

As Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki explain, Alice could make no sense of her diminished status. From childhood she had looked up to Germany, the land of Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Beethoven.

She had taken no interest in Jewish traditions or orthodoxy, yet she suddenly found herself counted as a member of a race which provoked as much hatred from Czechs as from the Germans.

In 1942, her adored elderly mother (who, as a child, had played with Gustav Mahler) was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and from there to the extermination camp, Treblinka.

All trace of her was lost. Alice, 39, sank into deep despair. She was close to breakdown until an inner voice urged her to learn Chopin's 24 Etudes.

These sublime pieces which express the ultimate sorrows and raptures of human existence are considered the most difficult and demanding undertaking for any pianist.

Some people maintain that several are unplayable. They became Alice's life-raft — by focusing all her mental strengths and determination on learning to play them, she retained her sanity, even though she lived in daily dread of discovery and instant execution.

In 1943, Alice, her husband and six-year-old son were sent to Theresienstadt, a small town that the Nazis had converted into a crammed ghetto, partly a front for what was in reality a transit camp for mass extermination.

They suffered the vile Nazi brutality and humiliation meted out to all concentration camp inmates.

Husbands and wives were separated, Alice and her son were herded with 100 other mothers and children on to mattresses in a freezing attic.

They scavenged for potato peelings, endured filth, stench, starvation rations, typhus, the sight of corpses being flung into burial pits and batches of inmates — including Alice's husband, never to be seen again — being transported for extermination.

From some motive never fully explained in the book, SS officials ordered inmates to participate in musical events.

Alice gave piano recitals, including the spellbinding etudes, and music lessons to children, which led to the formation of a children's choir. Her playing earned her special small favours — a hot shower, an extra spoonful of soup.

Some of those present at the concerts have left moving accounts of their impact.

They explain how the music offered them spiritual nourishment, and a brief interlude of transcendence as the cattle trucks rumbled away from the ghetto to Auschwitz.

An adult choir was assembled and performed a Requiem Mass for victims of Nazi crimes. Shortly afterwards the entire choir was dispatched to Auschwitz.

Hitler's defeat in 1945 meant that the survivors of Theresienstadt were free to go home. Alice and her son (who became an acclaimed cellist) found humble accommodation in Prague and acquired furniture, including a piano, from a storehouse packed with confiscated Jewish property.

Of the 89,000 incarcerated in Theresienstadt, 3,500 survived.

Of 15,000 children, just 130 lived through it.

Alice's experiences make you marvel at the resilience of the human spirit in the face of the most appalling mental and physical torment. It is just a pity that her story is told in such clunky, gushing and unstylish prose.

The ghastly expression 'over the moon' appears several times, and chunks of improbable, invented dialogue become increasingly irritating.

One wonders what Alice herself will make of it. Amazingly, she is now 103 years old, lives in London and still plays the piano every day.

In a foreword, she writes that 'music makes humans rich. It is the revelation of the divine. It takes us to paradise'.